


"All Around The World Was Waking, I Never Could Go Back"

by duccello



Category: Steven Universe (Cartoon)
Genre: Angst, But like...very metaphorical fluff, F/F, Fluff, Guys I'm gonna be real this is a literary experiment where Pearl and Amethyst happen to kiss, Healing, Pearl you are one repressed piece of work, i guess?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-01
Updated: 2015-12-01
Packaged: 2018-05-04 06:50:27
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 748
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5324597
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/duccello/pseuds/duccello
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>pearlmethyst drabble/writing exercise that I ended up liking. 3rd person in Pearl’s pov because I’m predictable like that; heavily inspired by Florence & the Machine’s “Blinding.” Almost could be called meta, but there's making out if you squint. Alternatively, imagine that this is literally what Pearl's internal monologue sounds like, complete with referring to herself in the third person, and laugh more than you should. I did.</p>
            </blockquote>





	"All Around The World Was Waking, I Never Could Go Back"

Some things, it’s true, make Pearl giggle. At times she will parole the practiced, pretty titter she once honed in back corners of gilded rooms, suppressed behind her hands, any sparkle kept safely contained in her eyes. But Amethyst makes her laugh: loud and shrill and impossible to ignore; ugly, lovely squawks of pure joy, tearing forth from deep inside her, doubling her over, scrunching her face out of its tastefully-molded decorum.

Over the course of the war, out of sheer necessity, Pearl had learned to raise her voice. She discovered she could care enough to kill or die, could care enough to disobey. And after hurtling her way through a series of bodies and a river of tears, she had learned that there was still a place for saying no, that she had to put a limit on how much she cared. She had fought those last few battles with a cool head, old weights temporarily moved back on her heart, and when the final strike was detonated and all that was familiar destroyed, she hadn’t cried until days later.

Amethyst makes her angry. Not furious, not righteously raging, just an everyday sort of angry that she’s relatively unfamiliar with. Which isn’t to say it’s not real—she can feel it in her fingertips and the skin of her face, forcing her to sweat her sickness out. She knows she’s being provoked. Amethyst pokes at every hang-up like you’d poke at a hornet’s nest—like she will, literally, poke at a hornet’s nest until Pearl is shrieking at her to stop, what do you think is going to happen. Until she’s pulling her hair, until she’s raising her voice, over and over again like some kind of impudent training regimen. Until the day she finally raises her voice with no anger behind it—calling her name down the beach—and she realizes again that there is no battle noise to pick the reply out of, and she can’t find her old weights anywhere.

It’s been a very long time indeed since Pearl learned to sigh. Her upward-cast eyes, her shoulders suddenly dropping in happy relaxation, are a living relic of a moment in time when she thought that, just maybe, she could have the new bliss of love and acknowledgement without getting involved in anything scary. Her sighs, like all her opinions and expressions in that era, were soundless, easily confined to Rose’s inner rooms. She understood the forbidden nature, the obscenity, even, of her pleasure and abandon. But oh, Amethyst gives her more than a sigh can handle—Amethyst makes her moan; her kisses still pull her in with only eighty percent Homeworld’s gravity, and they sing with the echoes of the magnetic core. Amethyst makes her hum like a fault line, growl like a tectonic plate grinding up the ocean floor, come down to Earth and bring her love home with her. In her embrace there is the relief of returning to primal geology—ten thousand years of numbness burned away in a single moment of outrageous freedom.

Arguably, Pearl was born knowing how to dance. Her grace is programmed into her chemistry; her balletic lines and airy flourishes come as easily as walking. Dancing has always been one of the few things that makes her feel like she fits—into the air, into the pull of a planet’s surface, into the universe. It’s a keyhole she was pulled from the moment she first formed, one that holds her shape exactly. It’s comfortable. Safe. An easy track to follow.

When she dances with Amethyst, when they really do it right, she goes off the rails. Beats hit her wiry body like a sculptor’s hammer, melodies pull her up and out, she bends and sways and the keyhole can no longer hold her. They match each other’s angles, they tile the plane, they leave geometry behind and sweep across the floor, break into each other’s arms like a wave, like energy, like light. They whirl faster and faster, unfolding relentlessly upwards, and she can feel them washed over with pure and iridescent music, a ribbon of brightness to bind them together—and she feels an impossible readiness, as if anything could happen, as if she wants it to happen. She can open her eyes and see that from up here, the past looks very far away.

She can open her eyes and see everything life has to give, and reach for it with all four hands.


End file.
